Inside His Head
by TurtleNapkins
Summary: Peeta's POV in select parts of The Hunger Games. One-shot.


**Disclaimer: I don't own. Obviously.**

The bright red weal on his cheek hurts.

Sighing, he probes the tender skin there cautiously, trying to turn his attention back to the lesson the teacher was currently preaching to them. Outside, the sky was clear and blue, in the beginnings of spring.

It was a huge difference from yesterday, when it had been pouring so hard you would be hard-pressed to see just five meters ahead of yourself. The slap itself was a reminder of that, a mark of his mother's anger when he'd purposely dropped the two perfectly fine loaves of bread into the fire. Food was getting harder and harder to come by these days, after all.

On the first day of school, his father had pointed to a little girl in a dress and told him that he'd once wanted to marry the girl's mother, only for her to run off with the coal miner. The coal miner, the man who even the birds stopped to listen to when he sang.

News traveled fast in District 12; he knew that the girl's father had been blown up in a mine explosion several weeks ago, leaving the rest of the family to fend for themselves. Ever since the accident, he'd never even once seen the girl's mother.

But he did see the man's two daughters grow so thin they were basically just bones, and how they never had anything to eat at lunchtime. People pitied them, of course, but not enough to share their meagre food supply with them.

Did he pity them? Was that why he had endured his mother's rage for them, to get them the bread when he'd found the girl pawing through their bin outside?

He sighs again, tapping the desk impatiently. The teacher drones on, oblivious to how his students are all close to sleeping. Outside, dandelions are blooming. He can see the girl now, surprisingly, perhaps skipping class. Class is no use to anyone anyway, because they are, at best, all going to be coal miners when they grow up.

Through the window of the school, the girl catches his eye. He knows her name, even if she doesn't know his. Katniss Everdeen. A long black braid down her back, empty grey eyes, although the crazed, half-starved look on her face from yesterday is gone now, replaced with something close to satisfaction, and he feels pride knowing he had a little to do with it.

After a moment, the girl breaks off their brief eye contact, then bends down and picks a dandelion. He frowns, and then the teacher's voice calls him back to reality, making him look away abruptly.

"Peeta!"

Outside, the girl tucks the dandelion into her pocket and swiftly walks away.

There's another boy with her now, too. Tall, maybe two years older than them, with the same black hair and grey eyes everyone in the Seam has, whether they like it or not, making them look somehow related to each other.

He knows, through eavesdropping on many, many conversations, that although the boy already looks like a man, he's only fourteen, and the object of many girls' affections. Much to their consternation, though, the only girl he ever seems to deem worthy to talk to is Katniss Everdeen.

If only it was any other than her.

He's not stupid, of course. He knows there's nothing romantic between the girl and the boy, but she's only twelve. A lot could happen. And there was no telling what. But he, unlike most of District 12's population, knows their connection.

Every day, once school got out, they would return home, grab their game bags, and head off into the woods. The fence surrounding District 12 is supposed to be electric twenty-four-seven, keeping the wild animals out, but mostly the electricity's almost always out, and the fence seems to keep the people in more than the animals out. They would slip in under the gap wormed between the bottom of the fence and the ground, lose themselves in the forest, and hunt.

No one can blame them, of course, not when they know their current situation, and how everyone in the District is dirt-poor. An extra bit of income is worth breaking the rules, and it wasn't as if there was anyone to punish them for breaking the rules. Being the most-ridiculed District in Panem has its advantages.

He's also heard how good a shot the girl was with a bow and arrows. He's never seen her in person, of course, and doubts anyone will except the boy, Gale Hawthorne, her apparent hunting partner, but he's heard the stories, and he can imagine. Anyone like her can do anything, in his opinion.

He stretches his neck absently, rearranging his long legs under the dinner table to a more comfortable position. His father had been right; he was completely, utterly hopeless. Maybe it was genetic, if what his father's stories about the girl's mother were anything to judge by.

"Stop fidgeting, Peeta," says his mother quietly, as they eat the stale bread leftover form their day at the bakery without complaint.

It had always been this way ever since he can remember. People think that since they own a bakery, have a more steady income of money than most, they are better fed. It's true, and they never go hungry, but it's also true that they save everything good for selling, and they have to eat the hard, stale loaves that nobody will ever buy.

Sometimes, when he has the time, when he isn't at school or helping out his father in the bakery, he fantasizes about what it would mean to them if he ever managed to win the Games. They'd all be able to live in the Victor's Village, the luxurious mansions way out of everyone's reach, be able to eat anything, drink anything, do as they pleased. No more work, if they didn't wish it, because money wouldn't be a problem anymore.

But he knew how much the odds were against his favor. Even if he were reaped for the Games, a tiny fraction of a chance – despite all her mistreatment of Peeta, her mother never let him sign up for tesserae like he knew the girl did, and there would only be five slips of his name in the reaping bowl that year – nobody in District 12 had won since Haymitch Abernathy, back when he hadn't even been alive.

Anyway, look how well Haymitch had turned out. He had won, yes, against twenty-three other people who all managed to die before him, in various bloody, gruesome ways, but he was now perpetually drunk.

Maybe it was his way of blocking out the nightmares that would have flooded his mind the moment he returned from the arena. That was everyone's best guess, but they all avoided him anyway, which wasn't so hard considering he only came into town for a steady supply of liquor, and spent the rest of his time holed up alone in his mansion.

Liquor was supposedly illegal in District 12, as well, but there was a black market of sorts called the Hob, where everything illegal was sold. Sometimes the Peacekeepers even went there themselves, even though they were supposed to be ridding the District of such things, for hot soup of questionable origin, alcohol, things that wouldn't, _shouldn't_, normally be sold.

He knew, because he'd been in just once or twice. Not of his own volition, because his parents had told him to steer well clear of it just in case, and no one had told him to. But because he wanted to know where the girl disappeared off to with Gale after they returned from the woods, their game bags full and bulging.

Sometimes they sold at the back doors of people's houses, at the mayor's, and a couple of times even at the bakery, where his father had traded a loaf of bread for two of their squirrels, shot dead in the eye. The squirrels were a rare treat for when their mother wasn't around, because she hated those kind of things.

He sighs, and gets up from the dinner table, taking up his empty plate and putting it into the sink. Nobody ever did the dishes, just let them pile up until one of them finally had to. He wipes his hands on his pants, and heads up the stairs for his bedroom. Tomorrow would be reaping day; he might as well get in some extra rest.

Every single part of him aches like hell, like something he'd never felt before. It was like his flesh had been lit on fire, and instead of burning away fast and ridding itself of the pain, his skin had decided to be immune to fire and let it burn away.

Groaning, his vision swimming red behind closed eyelids although there was no sun, he struggles to remember what had happened before, presumably before he'd apparently passed out on the wet bank of the river. There's mud everywhere, not exactly improving his mood.

A tiny gasp of pain escapes him as he wrongly tries to get up; there's something wrong with his right leg. Unable to open his eyes, he feels blindly for his side until his hand dips into the river, and cleans his face off, rinsing away the mud caking his skin. He pries his eyes open, gazes down at his leg, and almost pukes.

Bile rises in his throat anyway, and he gives himself a moment to steady his breathing before plunging on, taking in a more complete inventory of the huge, gaping cut Cato seems to have inflicted on him while he was trying to get away. He hadn't felt anything before he'd collapsed; he knew it had only been adrenaline that kept him going.

Other things begin to register. The parched quality of his throat, first; quickly, he takes a long drink from the river to calm it, not caring if the water was clean or not. Fully awake now, the pain is beginning to increase and he knows that it isn't going to be pretty. Carefully, trying to avoid jostling his injured leg, he lies back down on the mud and tries to work out what to do.

Running and hiding were obviously out of the question, and he is unarmed so wandering off in the middle of nowhere doesn't seem like a particularly good idea either. But in this weakened state, he is just about as good as dead if he doesn't find a hiding place, and fast.

And he had to stay alive. For her.

Wondering how many days he'd missed – the ache in his muscles told him it wasn't just the previous night he'd collapsed, and he thanked God that no one had found him then – before beginning to painstakingly rubbing mud all over his body.

He carefully drags a part of his pants over the bloody gash before slapping on a mound of mud. It would get infected soon, he knows, if he can't get any medicine for it, but there isn't anything he can do in this state. Grimacing, he gets the mud in all over his hair and skin and eyelids, so that when he closes his eyes, he would be nothing more than mud.

How fitting, he thinks, as the pain drags him under once more.

He can hear the blood rushing around his head, a steady whooshing nothing like his unsteady breathing. He wonders if anything can be steady inside him now, now that he knows the truth. The one thing he should've known from the very start.

She never loved him. Not once. Not like he loves her.

That in itself is hard to accept. What is harder is how convincingly she'd acted. How Haymitch had never even bothered to fill him in on the exact details of their act. How little he'd been trusted, told about their little schemes together.

He knows it's not entirely her fault, that she did what she had to get them home together, alive and relatively in one piece, but playing the blame game had always been one of his strengths when he'd been younger.

Apparently, gullibility was one too. He still can't believe how easily he'd eaten up her lies, just because it was what he'd desperately wanted to hear. But there was no point now. What was done was done, and there was no changing history.

He knows, from his own logic and from what little things he'd picked up during his, hers, and Haymitch's time together, that the Capitol wouldn't let their false romance drop, just like that, uncaringly. No, they'd probably revisit them once a year, before the Games, just to see how they were doing.

Which would mean only one thing.

They'd have to get married.

He doesn't know which is worse, getting married to please the Capitol or getting married to someone who obviously didn't care very much for him. If she did, maybe in a more platonic sense, then she wouldn't have agreed to the romance. Not even to keep them alive, because then they'd be living a lie.

Anger is, of course, the dominant emotion he's feeling right now, but there were the notes of hurt, loss, disappointment, and pain mixed in. Those feelings hurt enough by themselves, but then there was the fact that because he feels those emotions, then it was obvious he still cares for her, cares about what she thought about him.

That is the worst pain of all, and he knows there was nothing except time that could reverse what she'd done to him.

Sighing, he extends a hand over to her, sitting there, so peacefully, in the next seat. "One more time? For the audience?" he asks, and to his surprise, his voice isn't angry, but hollow, and somehow that is worse.

After a half-second's hesitation, she takes his hand, grips it tight. Both dread the time when they will have to let the other go.


End file.
